REFLECTIONS

CENTENNIAL REFLECTIONS & DIALOGUE SERIES

WITNESS TO A CENTURY'S END

And / Or

On Why Christ Must Return

Unveiling the Perils of Neuropic M/ Hysteries[1*]:

Crusades, Witch hunts and the White Man's Burden Revisited

A New Soteriology?

The New World Order is more than a play on semantics. It has its own deep truth that invokes its peculiar rhetoric and that needs something more than a flash of inspired reflection to be systematically tackled and exposed. It is on this account that we may begin by making a virtue of conclusions through an observation on the fluidity of boundaries and the opaqueness of meaning.

Mysteries can sometimes be read into histories, just as history sometimes has a way of turning into hystery. This happens when a chronology of events gives way to a psychopathy of reflexes.

Nowhere is this phenomenal regression more evident than in the manner in which the psychology of the New Europe is shaping under the impetus of its continental political restructuring. Nothing perhaps can better illustrate this morbid dynamic than the mounting tensions played out in the sordid backyard of resurrected pagan ethnicities, threatened identities and national insecurities. Ironically, it was the "return of the veil" worn by Muslim women that triggered this turn to hystery and unravelled a sequence that would unmask the veneer of European civility and expose the myth of a European Enlightenment. .

The drama is played out round the rediscovered visibility of the Muslim woman in the modern world. Through her modest attire she conveys a host of meanings that defy a misperceived set of conditioned reflexes. Foremost, she is seen by her prosecutors as bearer and perpetrator of a community of righteousness and light in a world where God-Consciousness is a violation of the secular creed and an abrogation of the rights of materialistic age of unbridled licentiousness, indulgence and self-abandon. And even if the courts of the high priests of modernity may have given her temporary respite, the devil's advocates in the abattoirs (slaughter-houses) of the Drina Valley in Blighted Bosnia have canonized a highly professional version of mass rape for an irrevocable verdict in the field. It is between the crudities and the sophistications of the one and the other, between the courts and the battleground, between the venues of proclaimed valour and high diplomacy and the back alleys of stealth, intrigue, stench, and dross that the balance and the fate of the soul of the new Europe hangs.

Will the New Europe, "Neuropa", succumb to the temptations of the neurosis of the veil and once again fall victim to its worst histories? Or, will the better part of a civilizing impulse and a genuine adhesion to the gospel of love, charity, and submission to the way of truth that Christ preached prevail? It is not without significance that for now, in its early phases at least, it is in the guise of contrived and misconceived religiosities that the ghosts of the crusading kingdoms are being resurrected. Nor is it without peril to the outcome of that balance to overlook the conflicting tugs and pulls at the level of European statecraft: a lukewarm politics of a vacillating conscience and morality offset by the feverish stings of a Realpolitik feeding on a lethally seductive brew of power and avarice.

I wake up to a twilight zone of faded recollections. I find myself privy to an ongoing debate and trial where the Defender of the Peace ( … Marsilio di Padua?) is making his case before the Counsel of the Muses. Though the Court is the Elyseum it seems to my flickering consciousness to be perpetually hovering on the brink of a precipice that winds its sinews into a raucous avalanche of cascading recesses. Chunks of frozen histories that remain to haunt and taunt. The defense is inadvertently turned into a prosecution. And as voices merge, the echoes reverberate in staccato:

"The Holocaust was a European Invention of the 20th Century; But so were the Pogroms before it, the Burning at the Stake, and the Great Inquisition. The Ethnic Cleansing on the eve of the 21st Century needs to be seen in this venerable lineage.

Nationalism is a European invention; but so was racism, fascism, nazism and communism. The humanism of the Renaissance and the humanism of the Enlightenment need to be assessed against these other Isms in the European sphere of civilization.

Freedom, liberation, and emancipation are a triple rendering of one and the same appellation which is part and parcel of the secular trinity in European modernity: … But so is capitalism, imperialism, colonialism and sexism. These have constituted the landmark dialectics of the chapter of history bequeathed to humankind by Europe under the name of modernity.

The Crusades and the Witch-hunts were the legacy of a medieval European Christendom that was dubbed by European historians as 'the Dark Ages'. The present demonization of the veil and the phobia of Islamic fundamentalism can only be a nostalgic return to crusading witch-hunts of a dark past by the heirs of Enlightenment.

Modern Technology is a European invention !… But so is Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl, the Gulf War, and the Drought in the Sahara. Star Trek Wars and Nuclear Waste have not added to the measure of security and prosperity of a stricken humanity in the global village that European ingenuity has ushered in to speed up the end of history."

According to Biblical justice, the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons. History is the greatest witness to the outcome of nations' intents: to their proven deeds and actions. The witness of history leaves little doubt as to the enormity of the burden of guilt that weighs down the blackened conscience of a significant segment of humanity identified with its European progeny: sons and daughters. For too long victims of delusions of mastery and election, only a feat of divine excruciation can deliver them of evil. Perhaps in this sense, the voices of the fundamentalist Christian revival are prophetic. The Gospel of Love and Redemption points to the imminence of the Second Coming of Christ: the Messiah and Deliverer, if only to bear witness against the inequities of those who claim his name.

Enter the Virgin Mary.

The scales that are on the eyes are removed.

The Virgin is veiled.

In veiling honor, shame is exposed.

The curtain rises.

ZAHIRA ABDIN CHAIR FOR WOMEN STUDIES

CENTENNIAL REFLECTIONS & DIALOGUE SERIES